The tall kid riding his bike around San Diego's Serra Mesa neighborhood in the 1960s, wearing a swami's turban and from time to time packing a bag of firecrackers and M-80s, might have seemed a little sketchy, but Richard Alf had to craft his own entrepreneurship-studies program back then.
Alf, at 17, was the co-founder, bankroller, and organizing genius behind Comic-Con, the comic-book fest that since 1970 has morphed into an
annual gathering for just about every nerd-embraced entertainment genre there is. The show attracts some 130,000 fans to San Diego each year. It's where Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft), and Matt Groening (need you ask?) meet their most ardent fans, many in costume.
Alf died January 4 of pancreatic cancer. He was 59 and had earlier agreed to donate his Comic-Con papers and memorabilia to San Diego State University. Lynn Hawkes, special projects officer for the school's library, says the papers will help entrepreneurship students understand what a bootstrapping start-up is all about.
Indeed. Alf, who grew to be 6-foot-6, began by selling firecrackers and such to neighborhood kids. One kid, grown addicted to the little explosions, ran out of cash, so he began trading his large comic-book collection to Alf. That was the start. Alf assembled some 20,000 comics.